Taking on the Test

Sitting in the empty library of San Leandro High School on a recent
sunny Saturday morning, Bob Williams struggles to remember the first
time he took the California Basic Educational Skills Test. "I want to
say, maybe August 1989," he finally says. "It was at San Francisco
State University." When you've taken the CBEST as often as Williams
has--10 times over the course of five years--it's hard to keep all the
details straight.

At the time, Williams, now 43, was teaching physical education at an
elementary school in San Leandro, a blue-collar city just south of
Oakland. But like many teachers, Williams aspired to become an
administrator. He had taken the necessary coursework, which left only
one more obstacle to clear: the CBEST.

Implemented in 1983 by state legislators who hoped to improve the
quality of California's teaching corps, the test measures basic skills
in reading, writing, and mathematics. Teachers who were certified
before the test went into effect do not have to take it, but
prospective teachers, as well as classroom teachers who want to move
into counseling or administrative positions, are required to pass the
examination to obtain their credentials. (In addition, some education
schools use the CBEST as an entrance examination, against the wishes of
the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which administers
the test.)

So Bob Williams took the test. And when he left the building at San
Francisco State that summer day, he couldn't help but think that
something had gone wrong. "I walked out feeling a little bit
frustrated," he says. "And I think primarily it had to do with feeling
like I didn't have enough time to answer all the questions and do as
well as I felt I was capable of doing. I felt really rushed. I walked
out not feeling real confident that I had cleared this hurdle."

Williams' doubts about his performance, it turned out, were right on
target. When he got his test results back, he had failed both the
writing and the math portions. He took the test again a few months
later, and this time, he passed the writing section, but the math
section continued to elude him.

Then, in the fall of 1990, Williams was offered an administrative
position: assistant principal at San Leandro High School. Shortly after
the fall term began, a jaywalking incident in front of the school had
led to a full-blown riot involving hundreds of minority students and
the San Leandro police. "There were some strong racial overtones
associated with the melee," says Williams, who is African-American. "It
got real ugly." In the aftermath, district officials realized they
needed to hire more minority administrators and faculty members to
reflect the community's changing demographics. Among other things, they
wanted Williams to establish a conflict-resolution program at the high
school. To get around the CBEST requirement, Williams was hired as a
"teacher on special assignment" rather than as an administrator. He
was, however, encouraged to continue taking the test until he passed
the math section.

"So I kept taking it," he says. "And there was a great deal of
frustration around that because I didn't want to keep taking it. Every
time I took it and got back the test results, I had these feelings of
inadequacy, of frustration, of doubt. I kept asking myself, Why do I
keep putting myself through this when I don't have to? I could always
go back to teaching. But I felt that this was a hurdle that I needed to
clear.

"I kept trying to keep this thing in perspective, but it became more
and more difficult each and every time I took it. Sometimes, I would
come real close to passing it, and other times not as close."

Eventually, Williams' job at San Leandro High School was eliminated,
and it looked as if he would have no choice but to go back to teaching.
About the same time, however, another assistant principal position
opened up at the school. Williams was encouraged to apply for the job,
which he did, but he had to withdraw his application when he failed the
CBEST yet again. "It was a major disappointment," he says, "not only
for me, but for people here at the school. So as a result, the district
went back to the drawing board and created a new position:
human-relations coordinator for the district." Because he would still
be considered a teacher on special assignment, Williams didn't need to
pass the CBEST to take the job. Still, he wasn't ready to give up. "I
wanted the administrative credential," he says. "I wanted to have that
as an option."

In September 1992, Williams' wife, Eileen, happened to see a
front-page article in The Tribune in Oakland about a lawsuit that had
just been filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. The class
action alleged that the CBEST was a "discriminatory selection device"
that was preventing otherwise qualified minority members from becoming
credentialed teachers. "White applicants," the suit alleged, "have
passed the CBEST at a rate of 80 percent, while African-Americans,
Latinos, and Asians have passed at rates of only 35 percent, 51
percent, and 59 percent, respectively." The suit had been filed on
behalf of three organizations--the Association of Mexican-American
Educators, the California Association for Asian-Pacific Bilingual
Education, and the Oakland Alliance of Black Educators--along with a
handful of individual teachers. As a class action, however, it had the
potential to affect the thousands of minority teachers who, like Bob
Williams, had failed the basic-skills test.

Williams decided to put in a call to John Affeldt, a lawyer with
Public Advocates Inc., a nonprofit, public-interest law firm in San
Francisco that had taken on the case. By November, Williams' name had
been added to the list of plaintiffs.

"Before I found out about the lawsuit," Williams says, "I felt
really helpless as far as some recourse. So it was really encouraging
to see that there were some people, in addition to myself, who had been
adversely affected by the test and were doing something about it."

As the suit made its way through the court system, Williams
continued to try to pass the test. "I would take it at least once,
sometimes twice, a year," he says. He took several CBEST
test-preparation classes, and he even arranged for one of his
colleagues to tutor him in math. Finally, in August 1994, he passed the
math section.

Now a fully credentialed assistant principal at San Leandro High,
Williams is eagerly awaiting the outcome of the suit. U.S. District
Judge William Orrick Jr. heard testimony--including Williams'--for
several days in February, but the trial is in recess until next month,
when two more weeks of testimony are scheduled. A decision is expected
by late summer or early fall.

"I'm going to feel a lot better at the conclusion of this lawsuit,"
says Williams, a muscular man with large hands who played football at
Linfield College in McMinnville, Ore. "I just hope we kick this CBEST
in the ass!" he adds, sounding very much like a PE teacher. "That's
what I'd really like to see happen, so that no one has to go through
what I had to go through."

It seems like such an obvious thing to do: Make sure teachers can
pass a test of basic skills before they are allowed to set foot in a
classroom. Yet teacher tests, which most states adopted in the 1980s,
have been mired in controversy right from the start. The National
Education Association and its state affiliates fought the spread of
teacher testing tooth and nail, arguing that no single test can
determine whether a teacher can teach. In 1983, when then-Gov. Bill
Clinton of Arkansas proposed that tenured teachers be required to pass
the National Teacher Examination, a basic-skills test developed by the
Educational Testing Service, the Arkansas Education Association filed
suit in federal court. It lost.

By 1985, the NEA had dropped its opposition to teacher testing as a
licensing requirement, although it continued to oppose the testing of
veteran teachers and the use of test scores for admission to education
schools. Two years later, according to a study issued by the U.S.
Department of Education, 44 states either required or planned to
require that prospective teachers pass a test to be fully certified,
and 27 states had similar requirements for admission to teacher
education programs. In addition, three states--Arkansas, Georgia, and
Texas--mandated tests of veteran teachers. "No other teacher reform has
been adopted as widely," observed education writer Thomas Toch in his
1991 book In the Name of Excellence: The Struggle To Reform the
Nation's Schools, Why It's Failing, and What Should Be Done.

In 1983, the Education Department released the landmark report A
Nation at Risk, which warned that "the educational foundations of our
society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that
threatens our very future as a nation and a people." In the wake of
that report, state lawmakers seized on the idea of testing teachers as
a relatively easy way to improve the quality of public schools. Yet
almost as soon as the tests were put in place, reformers criticized
them for promising more than they delivered. The 1987 Education
Department study, for instance, noted that because the primary focus of
most teacher tests was on basic skills in reading, writing, and
mathematics, "at best, such [testing] programs can assure that teachers
are not illiterate." The study also asserted that the "common practice"
of establishing "extremely low passing scores" for the tests ensured
that "only the grossly incompetent are denied access to the
profession."

Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of
Teachers, had said much the same thing in 1985, when he noted that most
minimum-competency tests for teachers would be considered "a joke" by
members of any other profession. Such tests, he said, are "the
equivalent of licensing doctors on the basis of an exam in elementary
biology." The union leader proposed that a much tougher national
examination for teachers, similar to those required by the medical and
legal professions, be developed instead. (The National Board for
Professional Teaching Standards was created in 1987 for that very
purpose. Still in its infancy, the independent, privately organized
board began certifying teachers last year; 268 teachers have now passed
one of the board's rigorous, multipart assessments.)

The teacher tests may have been easy, but they were producing some
disturbing results. As Toch observed in 1991, "Nearly 20 percent of
California's teaching candidates have failed that state's basic-skills
test at least once since its inception in 1983. Similarly, one of every
10 veteran teachers in Arkansas failed that state's simplistic 1985
exam; an equal percentage of Texas' 170,000 teachers flunked that
state's 1986 test; and the failure rate has hovered near 10 percent
among Georgia's veteran teachers, who have been required since 1985 to
pass basic subject-matter tests to renew their licenses."

Even more disturbing for some was the fact that minorities were
failing the tests in disproportionately high numbers. "Fully 72 percent
of blacks and 52 percent of Hispanics," Toch wrote, "have failed the
Texas education school admission examination, compared with 27 percent
of whites. In New York, 64 percent of blacks failed the
communications-skills section of that state's teacherlicensing
examination in 1987, 65 percent failed the general-knowledge section,
and 43 percent failed the professional-knowledge section; the failure
rates for whites were 17 percent, 22 percent, and 9 percent,
respectively." The list went on.

Armed with these alarming statistics, opponents of teacher testing
argued that the examinations were preventing minorities from entering
the teaching profession at a time when their presence in the nation's
schools was needed more than ever. Several court cases ensued, but the
results were mixed. In Texas, for example, black and Hispanic
plaintiffs challenged the state's use of the Pre-Professional Skills
Test as a prerequisite for admission into teacher education programs
because it allegedly discriminated against minorities. The district
court agreed, but an appellate court later overturned the decision. In
Alabama, however, when four black teachers and a predominantly black
university sued the state after a disproportionate number of minority
candidates failed the state's teacher-certification examination, an
out-of-court settlement favoring the plaintiffs was eventually reached.
Under the terms of the agreement, a new test was devised, but its use
as the sole criterion for certification was eliminated. The settlement
also prohibited testing of material not taught in the teacher education
curriculum, and it established review panels with minority members to
examine the test for cultural and racial bias.

Now, the legal battle has shifted to Judge Orrick's courtroom in
downtown San Francisco. The circumstances may be different, but the
questions essentially are the same: If minorities fail
teacher-certification tests at a higher rate than whites, are the tests
somehow biased? Or are the disproportionate results merely a reflection
of a disparity in educational opportunity that exists between whites
and minorities? These are the questions Orrick must come to terms with
before he decides the fate of the California Basic Educational Skills
Test.

When he's in the courtroom, John Affeldt dresses like a typical
lawyer: blue suit, white shirt, red tie. But his mustache and goatee
give him away; this is no high-priced corporate attorney. A 33-year-old
graduate of Harvard Law School, Affeldt is paid strictly by salary,
which, he notes, is about one-third of what he could be making if he
had gone the corporate route. But like most public-interest lawyers,
Affeldt is motivated by the belief that what he is doing just might
change things for the better. He and Brad Seligman, who works for the
Impact Fund, a nonprofit foundation in Berkeley, have devoted countless
hours to the CBEST lawsuit over the past few years, and they say
they'll take their fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if they
have to.

"Our basic argument," Affeldt says, "is that the test is not valid.
It's not a valid measure of basic skills that teachers need, for anyone
of any color. And the state has not produced the evidence to
demonstrate that it is. It so happens that it's also biased against
people of color."

But shouldn't teachers have a firm grasp of basic skills?

"Of course they should," he says. "Let me emphasize that we don't
dispute that teachers need to be able to read, write, and compute. The
problem is, this test doesn't tell us whether or not teachers can read,
write, and compute, and it keeps out large numbers of qualified
teachers of color in the process." The state denies it, he adds, but
the CBEST is really an IQ test disguised as a cognitive-skills test.
"The only function it really serves is to give the public an elusive
boost in confidence about the teaching force," he explains. "The test
was a legislated, political instrument from the beginning. It has never
been a valid, psychometric, job-related instrument." Furthermore,
Affeldt maintains that the CBEST has always been a test of
college-level skills and not, as the state asserts, of high
school-level skills. "It's sort of a joke on our side that the longer
this case goes on, the easier the test gets. If we keep going, it's
going to become a 1st-grade test!"

For the test to be valid, Affeldt argues, there would have to be a
strong correlation between performance on the test and performance on
the job. But such a link, he insists, never has been shown. "If these
are foundational skills that you absolutely need," he says, "then
there's no way you could lack these skills, as evidenced by the test,
and still be a good teacher. But the fact that there are so many
thousands of people who have failed the test but who are effective
teachers, counselors, and administrators points to evidence that
there's something wrong with the test."

Take Bob Williams, for example. According to the lawsuit, "He has
consistently received high praise and excellent evaluations as an
educator. Moreover, as a teacher, he was particularly commended for his
excellent leadership potential and for the extent to which his
attitude, countenance, and skill level make him an excellent role model
for students." Yet Williams was denied the opportunity to become a
certified administrator simply because he could not pass the math
section of the CBEST. Affeldt argues that none of Williams' duties as a
teacher or as an assistant principal required the kind of math skills
necessary to pass the test.

Then there's Sara Boyd, also named in the suit. An award-winning
African-American teacher and administrator in Atherton, Calif., Boyd
received a temporary waiver from the state allowing her to become vice
principal of Menlo-Atherton High School. She took the CBEST four times
over the course of six years in her quest to become fully certified as
an administrator. She failed each time. "She was so humiliated by the
experience," Affeldt says, "that she refused to take it anymore." Boyd
has since retired.

And what about Diana Kwan? Born in mainland China, Kwan aspired to
become a bilingual elementary school teacher and counselor in San
Francisco. Yet because she could not pass the CBEST, she was denied
admission to a master's program at San Francisco State, the same school
that had previously awarded her a bachelor's degree. According to the
lawsuit, she graduated with a 3.3 grade-point average. "Were the CBEST
requirement eliminated," the lawsuit contends, "Kwan would immediately
seek admittance to her chosen credentialing program, for which she is
otherwise fully qualified, in order to obtain a preliminary teaching
credential." Kwan now works as a flight attendant for United
Airlines.

"Absurd results flow from absurd measures," the lawsuit states.
"Proven administrators who have neither studied nor needed geometry in
30 years are suddenly at risk of losing a job that requires no geometry
because of the CBEST math section; much-needed bilingual math teachers
are prevented from teaching because their written English lacks
idiomatic flair; teachers of Spanish for native speakers are hired
instead by private schools because they cannot answer as many reading
questions in an hour as a native English test-taker."

As for the question of bias, Affeldt points out that the burden is
on the state of California to show that the test doesn't favor, as he
puts it, "white, middle-class, testwise students." But he thinks the
test results speak for themselves; the fact that minorities fail the
examination at a disproportionately higher rate than whites proves that
the test is flawed. Asked for a specific example of cultural bias,
Affeldt cites a question in which test-takers were asked to write an
essay about the sport of fly fishing. Affeldt says the person who told
him about the question was born in Mexico and had no idea what fly
fishing was. "He thought the question was about flying fish," the
lawyer says.

Affeldt further argues that when Bill Honig, the former
superintendent of public instruction for the state of California, set
the initial passing scores for the CBEST, he ignored the
recommendations of his own staff. "In order to placate perceived fears
surrounding the quality of public education," the lawsuit alleges, "the
state set substantially higher passing rates than recommended based
entirely on political considerations and contrary to the state's own
data."

At the trial in February, Honig testified that he was given several
different recommendations regarding the passing scores but that he
ultimately based his decision on what he thought an "adequate teacher"
should know before entering the profession, even though he knew the
scores he selected would have the greatest effect on minorities.
Nonetheless, he stands by his decision, and, in fact, he thinks the
scores he set "are probably a little bit too low, actually."

The plaintiffs have already won several victories in the case. In
1993, Judge Orrick ruled that the CBEST was not a state licensing
examination but rather an employment test subject to federal laws
requiring it to be related to performance on the job. As a result of
that decision, the state revised the math portion, removing the more
difficult geometry and algebra questions and leaving only items that
required basic computation and problem-solving skills. The state also
extended the time allotted for completing the test. But the plaintiffs
were still not satisfied, so they asked Orrick to decide whether the
revised test did, in fact, meet federal guidelines. If the judge rules
in favor of the plaintiffs, he may order the state to scrap the test
entirely, or he may ask that it be modified yet again.

Another victory for the plaintiffs came in 1994, when Orrick allowed
the case to go ahead as a class action on behalf of the approximately
50,000 minority teacher candidates who have failed the test since its
inception. The plaintiffs are asking for compensatory damages, which
includes back pay for all those prospective teachers, counselors, and
administrators whose careers were affected by the test. Affeldt hasn't
come up with a specific amount yet, but, he says, "you can be sure it's
quite substantial."

The problem with the plaintiffs' case: When you look at the test
itself, it's hard to imagine how any college graduate couldn't pass it.
The AFT's Shanker calls the test "extremely easy." David Wright, the
director of professional services for the California Commission on
Teacher Credentialing, testified that he gave portions of the test to
his then 11-year-old triplets, and they answered all 60 questions
correctly. "Each reported to me that they found the items 'easy,'"
Wright noted. Gary Hart, the former California state lawmaker who
sponsored the initial CBEST legislation, says the test is "not a
particularly sophisticated examination." Mary Bergan, the president of
the California Federation of Teachers, an AFT affiliate that supported
the CBEST right from the start, says, "It's an easy test." (The much
larger California Teachers Association, an affiliate of the National
Education Association, was less enthusiastic about the idea, but it
eventually supported the CBEST. In 1993, however, it filed a friend of
the court brief in support of the plaintiffs' lawsuit. The union argued
that the test was a "major impediment" to achieving ethnic and racial
diversity in the schools and therefore should be scrutinized by the
court.)

The CBEST is administered throughout the state of California six
times a year. (It is also used to screen prospective teachers in
Oregon.) According to the 1995-96 registration bulletin, the test is
designed "to provide information about basic proficiency in reading,
mathematics, and writing." The reading and math sections each contain
50 multiple-choice questions, while the writing section consists of two
essay questions. The test must be completed in four hours, but
test-takers may use that time to work on any or all of the three
sections. Also, there is no limit to the number of times someone may
take the test in order to pass, and test-takers do not have to pass all
three sections at one sitting. (A $40 registration fee, however, must
be paid each time the test is taken.)

The type of questions on the CBEST should be familiar to anyone who
has taken the Scholastic Assessment Test, the American College Test,
or, for that matter, any standardized test. The reading section, for
example, contains several passages--some short, some long--followed by
questions from three skill categories: literal comprehension,
inferential comprehension, and critical comprehension. Here's a sample
question:

After touring the plains toward the close of the cowboy era,
journalist Richard Harding Davis observed, "The inhabited part of a
ranch, the part of it on which the owners live, bears about the same
proportion to the rest of the ranch as a lighthouse does to the ocean
around it."

Based on Richard Harding Davis' observation, which of the following
can be inferred about a ranch toward the close of the cowboy era?

A. Most of a ranch was uninhabited by its owners.
B. The size of a ranch rivaled the size of an ocean.
C. Inhabitants of a ranch typically lived in privacy and
seclusion.
D. The working area around a ranch was uninhabitable by humans.
E. The inhabitants of a ranch, like those of a lighthouse, should be
viewed as caretakers.

Here's another sample:

All fruit juices contain the sugar fructose, and there is no doubt
that some kinds of sugar are harmful.

Which of the following can be correctly inferred from the statement
above?

A. All fruit juices are harmful.
B. Some, but not all, fruit juices are harmful.
C. Grapefruit juice does not contain any sugar.
D. Fruit juices are more harmful than vegetable juices.
E. Orange juice contains at least one kind of sugar.

(The correct answers are A and E.)

The mathematics section, according to the registration bulletin, is
intended to assess the testtaker's "cumulative knowledge of mathematics
from having studied it all through elementary school, high school, and
possibly college." It may include questions about such concepts as odd
and even numbers, percentages, ratio and proportion, powers and roots
of numbers, area, volume, graphs, simple coordinate geometry, simple
algebra, and simple probability, among others. Here's a sample
question:

Amy drinks 1-1/2 cups of milk three times a day. At this rate, how
many cups of milk will she drink in one week?

A. 4-1/2
B. 7-1/2
C. 10-1/2
D. 21-1/2
E. 31-1/2

Here's another, presumably more difficult, sample question:

Alicia's gross weekly salary is $412.50. If 2 percent of this salary
is deducted for state taxes and 8 percent is deducted for benefits,
which of the following is the closest estimate of the total amount, in
dollars, of these deductions?

The writing section of the CBEST consists of two essay topics,
which, according to the test bulletin, "are designed to demonstrate
your ability to write effectively." Here's the first sample topic:

Ernest Hemingway once commented, "As you get older, it is harder to
have heroes, but it is sort of necessary." To what extent do you agree
or disagree with his observation? Support your answer with specific
examples.

And here's the second sample topic:

Most students have had some type of difficulty in one course or
another. Difficulties stem from various sources, such as teacherstudent
conflicts or lack of interest in the subject field.

Write about one such situation you faced either as a student or as a
teacher. Identify the type of class and explain whether you were able
to resolve the problem. If so, how was it resolved? If not, what was
the outcome and why?

Each section of the CBEST is scored on a scale of 20 to 80. The
passing score for each portion is 41 points. That means a test-taker
must answer 65 percent of the math questions correctly and 70 percent
of the reading questions correctly. (The writing section is evaluated
by a total of four scorers, two for each essay.) Although a total score
of at least 123 is required to pass the entire test, examinees may
score as low as 37 on one or two sections, provided the total score is
still 123 or higher.

If the sample questions are any indication, the CBEST appears to be
a simple, straightforward exam that most high school seniors, let alone
classroom teachers, should be able to pass. You might have to bone up
on long-forgotten math formulas and test-taking skills, and you might
even have to take one of the many test-preparation courses now offered
throughout the state. And if you fail it the first time, you'll
probably pass it the second time around. According to David Wright of
the state commission on teacher credentialing, "Most people who fail
one or more subtests of the CBEST retake it and pass in due course,
especially if they take steps in the interim to improve the basic
acquired cognitive skills measured by the CBEST or, where relevant, to
improve their English fluency." Furthermore, he argues, "the passing
rate gaps between ethnic groups narrow very substantially upon
retesting."

As The Los Angeles Times noted in a recent editorial defending the
examination, the skills it measures "are hardly standards that shoot
past the moon." Do parents want their children taught by teachers who
can't pass such a test?

But if the test is so easy, argues John Affeldt, why do so many
people of color have such a hard time passing it?

It's no great mystery, counters R. Lawrence Ashe Jr., the lawyer
hired by the state of California to defend the test in court. A partner
with Paul, Hastings, Jonofsky & Walker in the firm's Atlanta
office, Ashe has spent much of his career defending the use of
standardized tests, which explains why he was brought in to handle the
case. "It's a fairly arcane specialty," he says.

Ashe, a 55-year-old native of Knoxville, Tenn., who graduated from
Harvard law school in 1967, doesn't deny that the pass rates for the
CBEST are lower for minorities than for whites. But don't blame the
test, he argues; the test results are merely a reflection of a flawed
public system of education. "They are an alarming, seemingly very hard
to correct, indictment of the adequacy of the education we are
providing to ethnic minorities," he asserts. "For example, the average
inner-city kid is not getting the same education as a middleclass kid.
And ethnic minorities disproportionately are going to those inner-city
schools. Further, we say that if you lower the bar even more and let
through a greater number of ethnic minorities, where are they going to
teach? They're going to teach those same inner-city kids, and you're
going to recycle this problem. I mean, you can't teach kids what you
don't know. If you don't know basic English grammar, if you can't write
a simple essay or a note home to parents, if you can't speak in correct
English, then you're not going to be able to teach those things, by
definition.

"We say what needs to be corrected is the problem identified by the
CBEST. Don't shoot the messenger."

The test itself, Ashe points out, is "a very lowlevel screen--8th-
to 10th-grade level skills. Frankly, it's embarrassing to the state of
California how low-level a screen it is. And there's effectively no
time limit on it."

Ashe dismisses the possibility that the CBEST is somehow biased
against minorities. "There certainly is no apparent cultural bias in
the test," he says. "Each test item is reviewed very, very carefully by
a disproportionately ethnic group of bias reviewers, so they don't ask
things like, 'What is each period in a polo game called?' Or things
like that." (The fly-fishing question presumably has been removed.)

What about the plaintiffs' contention that there is no established
link between CBEST results and on-the-job performance?

"Let me give you an analogy," Ashe answers. "The CBEST is like the
driver's license written test. The goal is not to predict who is going
to be a good driver or the best driver. The goal is to ensure that
someone who doesn't have minimum knowledge of traffic laws is not
allowed out on the highway, because we know that's unsafe. That's a
simplistic comparison of what the CBEST is trying to do, but not
remotely is the test trying to predict who is going to be a good
teacher."

But what about apparently well-qualified teachers like Bob Williams
and Sara Boyd who were denied the opportunity to advance their careers
because of the test? Is that fair?

Williams, Ashe points out, may have been a good teacher, but his
academic achievements in high school and college were unimpressive.
"His combined SAT scores were something like 623, on a scale of 400 to
1600," Ashe says. He's looked at Williams' transcript from Linfield
College, a small liberal-arts school, "and there's not a single math
course on it. He got credit for things like weight lifting,
intercollegiate wrestling, folk dancing, etc. There's one English
course on it; that's the spring semester of his senior year, when he
got a C in black American literature. What is there on that transcript
that tells us that he's got minimum cognitive skills in reading,
writing, and math?"

After college, Williams took the Graduate Record Examination, on
which he scored in the 4th percentile on the verbal section and in the
2nd percentile on the quantitative section. "And then," Ashe says, "he
is admitted, for reasons that I don't understand, to Stanford
University, to a master's program in physical education. ... I can
promise you that in a normal program in a graduate program at Stanford
that you or I might have applied to, they'd have laughed if we had
showed up with GREs in the 2nd and 4th percentile. It's an elite, very
selective school."

Ashe admits that Williams' failure to pass the skills test had an
effect on the teacher's career. "But he has now passed the CBEST," he
says. "It took him a long time to pass the math part. He did tutoring,
and he studied. And he doesn't agree with this, but I would argue that
an assistant principal ought to understand basic math." He calls
Williams a "success story" because of his determination to clear the
CBEST hurdle. (Williams smiles at the characterization. "I am a success
story," he admits. "But at what cost? What price must a person pay to
surmount odds that actually shouldn't even be in place?")

Ashe is less charitable toward Sara Boyd, whom he refers to as
Affeldt's "poster plaintiff." He points out that during a videotaped
deposition, Boyd testified that she had a 3.5 grade-point average in
college. But according to Ashe, Boyd's transcript shows that she
actually had a GPA of 2.44. "You can eyeball it and know it's not 3.5,"
he says. "It's got four D's on it staring you in the face. You don't
get a 3.5 with four D's."

At that same deposition, Boyd testified that eight out of 80
teachers at her school were black. When Ashe said, "Ten percent?" Boyd
replied "No." Ashe pressed the matter. "So what percent of 80 is
eight?" he asked. For 40 seconds, Boyd was silent. Finally, she said,
"Can you rephrase that? I'm drawing a blank here." When Ashe rephrased
the question, Boyd replied, "That's about 1 percent."

Affeldt attributes Boyd's lapse to a case of nerves. But court
documents show that Boyd took the test four times, and she never scored
above a 23 on the math portion. She passed the writing section on the
first attempt, but she never scored above 34 on the reading portion.
"You get 20 points just for signing your name," Ashe notes. Boyd, he
says, "is a nice woman. It wouldn't trouble me at all to have her in
charge of my children if I were going out of town for the weekend. But
I don't want her teaching."

Regarding Diana Kwan, who didn't get into a teacher-preparation
program at San Francisco State because she couldn't pass the CBEST,
Ashe points out that English is her fourth language and that she hasn't
taken the test since she was in college. "I'm convinced she would have
passed it if she had kept trying," he says. "Every single plaintiff who
kept taking it passed it. The only ones who remained failures quit
taking it."

Albert Shanker may be the president of the nation's second-largest
teachers' union, but he's second to none when it comes to speaking out
on standards for teachers--or the lack of them. "There are teachers who
can't write very well themselves," he says. "There are teachers who
can't read very well. There are lots of teachers who can't spell. I get
letters from some of them, so I can tell. And so can parents when they
get a letter from a teacher. And there are teachers who are not
generally very well-educated people. So when they meet with parents,
the parent wants to know, 'How did that person get to be a teacher? And
how can my child learn from a person who doesn't know much him- or
herself?' So the standards are too low. Does anybody say the standards
for entering teaching today are too high?"

Shanker recently weighed in on the CBEST debate in his weekly paid
advertising column in The New York Times. He wrote: "Is it OK for
students to be taught by teachers who can't understand a 10th-grade
textbook or figure out the answer to an easy math problem? Here's a
simple test: Ask the parents in the Asian or Hispanic or
African-American communities whether they want role models for their
children who can't read and write English at a high school level. Ask
them where their children will be in 20 years if they have not learned
these skills because their teachers didn't have them. The last thing
children of color need is to be taught by teachers who don't meet a
minimum standard. Furthermore, if the CBEST is killed, the level of
people in the teaching profession will drop generally and California
students of all races will suffer.

"Those who are challenging the CBEST have been denied jobs--and we
can understand why they want to eliminate the exam. But they are doing
no favor to the students they would teach. And those who are going
along with them and offering them support are doing no favor to the
teaching profession--or public education. What can we say of a
profession devoted to teaching our young people that does not demand at
least a basic competency in reading, writing, and math of its members?
The problems that minority candidates have with the CBEST mean that we
must do a much better job of eliminating the disparities between the
education of minority children and the others. Abolishing the test will
only help perpetuate them."

John Affeldt calls Shanker's argument "surprisingly shallow." The
California test, he maintains, "is not going to improve the teaching
force, and it hasn't improved the teaching force. There's no evidence
that things are better now because of the CBEST." But like much of the
plaintiffs' argument, that's counterintuitive. Common sense tells you
that testing teachers for basic skills in reading, writing, and
mathematics is bound to improve the teaching force. Of course, The
Association of Mexican-American Educators, et al. v. The State of
California and the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing is
being heard in a court of law, and Judge Orrick may very well rule in
favor of the plaintiffs. But what if the case were taken to the streets
and tried in the court of public opinion? Would it stand a
chance?

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